Tag Archives: Die Welt

Amid so many of my reviews, I’ve so often felt both the need and the inclination to write that history continues to unfortunately repeat itself. The above opening quote, along with the title of this book, do absolutely nothing whatsoever to make me feel anything otherwise.

With a madman in the White House, France deliberating whether or not to vote for the out-and-out, Nazi-Crazed-Nationalist this coming Sunday, and an overtly spineless, dithering Theresa May in Downing Street, we do indeed live in a world gone mad.

Yes: God help our poor planet in the grip of this madness.

To add further fuel to a fire already out of political control, two of the above are women; which, when placed alongside the authoress of this fine book, Astrid Lindgren, does make one either quake with frustration or wonder what society has come to. There again, so far as Britain is concerned, there really is no such thing as society – an ideology set in inexorable place by another (altogether wretched) woman, Margaret Thatcher. And boy, has her vision come true.

As Britain is falling apart at the seams.

All the more reason that May’s cabinet should readily take heed of A World Gone Mad – The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-45a most readable, vivid and intensely personal chronicle of a Europe on the precipice of self-annihilation: ”What a world, what an existence! Reading the papers is a depressing pastime. Bombs and machine guns hounding women and children in Finland, the oceans full of mines and submarines, neutral sailors dying, or at best being rescued in the nick of time after days and nights of privation on some wretched raft, the behind-the-scenes tragedy of the Polish population (nobody’s supposed to know what’s happening, but some things get into the papers anyway), special sections on the trams for ‘the German master race,’ the Poles not allowed out after 8 in the evening and so on […]. What hatred it will generate! In the end the world will be so full of hate that it will choke us.”

Sound familiar?

What with Isis, terrorists and the deplorable Nigel Farage spouting forth with more nationalistic bile than ought to be allowed, the world is already on the verge of choking. Choking on it’s nigh unquenchable embrace of ignorance, greed and cowardice. Three areas this brave, and according to Die Welt, ”breathtaking read,” touches on throughout its yearly titled chapters (1939 to 1945).

Implausibly regal and refreshing to read, these 220 pages (excluding Glossary of Names) are a Swedish civilian and mother’s account of a dark and incendiary world – which more than anything else, ought to act as some kind of literary warning.